Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Frontier Justice

It's hard not to feel sympathy for this woman although when you read the details it turns out she probably could have handled the situation a little less violently:

Tammy Gibson will be spending three months behind bars for taking a baseball bat to a sex offender for talking to her then-10-year-old daughter last summer.

Is this Puyallup, WA, mom remorseful or scared? "I'd do it again, if not better," she tells ABC News Seattle affiliate KOMO-TV.

If the man, who the story tells us is 7'3" tall, had been talking to the daughter when the mother attacked him her behavior may not have gotten her any jail time at all, but actually that wasn't the case. The police had passed out flyers saying the man was living in the neighborhood, and she recognized him from the flyer as a man she had seen talking to her daughter some time before.

She then went to his house with the bat and started beating him and even threatened to kill him. Doubtless the man's intentions in talking to her little girl were not innocent, yet he hadn't actually molested the girl so the mother probably should have handled the situation differently.

At least, most of the commenters think she should have handled it differently. They think she should have killed him.

RLC